Quantum neural architecture search (QNAS) has emerged as a promising approach for automatically designing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) for near-term quantum machine learning tasks. However, quantum evolutionary algorithm (QEA)-based QNAS methods often suffer from slow distribution concentration and insufficient update adaptivity in high-dimensional discrete search spaces, which limits both search efficiency and final model performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes Structural Probability Adaptive Quantum Neural Architecture Search (SPA-QNAS), a search-dynamics-enhanced QNAS method built upon the EQNAS benchmark framework. SPA-QNAS introduces two complementary mechanisms into the QPV-driven evolutionary search loop: Structural Probability Enhancement (SPE) and Adaptive Evolutionary Control (AEC). SPE reinforces elite structural decisions to accelerate the concentration of the structural sampling distribution toward high-fitness regions, while AEC adaptively regulates the rotation updates of non-elite individuals according to fitness feedback, thereby improving update stability and suppressing ineffective disturbances. Under the same search space, circuit template, and quantum resource budget as EQNAS, SPA-QNAS is evaluated on the MNIST and Warship benchmark datasets. Experimental results across multiple independent runs demonstrate that SPA-QNAS achieves higher classification accuracy and more stable performance compared with EQNAS. In representative experiments, SPA-QNAS achieves classification accuracies of 99.42% on MNIST and 85.33% on Warship under the same search space and quantum resource budget as EQNAS. These results indicate that improving QPV-based evolutionary update dynamics is an effective way to enhance the stability and robustness of QNAS under fixed quantum resource constraints.
Quantum neural architecture search (QNAS) has emerged as a promising approach for automatically designing parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) for near-term quantum machine learning tasks. However, quantum evolutionary algorithm (QEA)-based QNAS methods often suffer from slow distribution concentration and insufficient update adaptivity in high-dimensional discrete search spaces, which limits both search efficiency and final model performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes Structural Probability Adaptive Quantum Neural Architecture Search (SPA-QNAS), a search-dynamics-enhanced QNAS method built upon the EQNAS benchmark framework. SPA-QNAS introduces two complementary mechanisms into the QPV-driven evolutionary search loop: Structural Probability Enhancement (SPE) and Adaptive Evolutionary Control (AEC). SPE reinforces elite structural decisions to accelerate the concentration of the structural sampling distribution toward high-fitness regions, while AEC adaptively regulates the rotation updates of non-elite individuals according to fitness feedback, thereby improving update stability and suppressing ineffective disturbances. Under the same search space, circuit template, and quantum resource budget as EQNAS, SPA-QNAS is evaluated on the MNIST and Warship benchmark datasets. Experimental results across multiple independent runs demonstrate that SPA-QNAS achieves higher classification accuracy and more stable performance compared with EQNAS. In representative experiments, SPA-QNAS achieves classification accuracies of 99.42% on MNIST and 85.33% on Warship under the same search space and quantum resource budget as EQNAS. These results indicate that improving QPV-based evolutionary update dynamics is an effective way to enhance the stability and robustness of QNAS under fixed quantum resource constraints.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) represent an emerging technology that uses a quantum computer for neural network computations. The QNNs have demonstrated potential advantages over classical neural networks in certain tasks. As a core component of a QNN, the parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) plays a crucial role in determining the QNN's overall performance. However, quantum circuit architectures designed manually based on experience or using specific hardware structures can suffer from inefficiency due to the introduction of redundant quantum gates, which amplifies the impact of noise on system performance. Recent studies have suggested that the advantages of quantum evolutionary algorithms (QEAs) in terms of precision and convergence speed can provide an effective solution to quantum circuit architecture-related problems. Currently, most QEAs adopt a fixed rotation mode in the evolution process, and a lack of an adaptive updating mode can cause the QEAs to fall into a local optimum and make it difficult for them to converge. To address these problems, this study proposes an adaptive quantum evolution algorithm (AQEA). First, an adaptive mechanism is introduced to the evolution process, and the strategy of combining two dynamic rotation angles is adopted. Second, to prevent the fluctuations of the population's offspring, the elite retention of the parents is used to ensure the inheritance of good genes. Finally, when the population falls into a local optimum, a quantum catastrophe mechanism is employed to break the current population state. The experimental results show that compared with the QNN structure based on manual design and QEA search, the proposed AQEA can reduce the number of network parameters by up to 20% and increase the accuracy by 7.21%. Moreover, in noisy environments, the AQEA-optimized circuit outperforms traditional circuits in maintaining high fidelity, and its excellent noise resistance provides strong support for the reliability of quantum computing.
Quantum Machine Learning (QML) utilizes the principles of quantum computations to improve the performance of learning by the use of parameterized quantum circuits and variational algorithms. But despite the qubit number, circuit depth, and patterns of entanglement, creating the optimal quantum circuit architectures for particular machine learning applications remains an important problem. Fixed circuits, or classical Neural Architecture Search (NAS), are not enough to transfer knowledge to other tasks and/or to search the quantum search space efficiently. In this context, this paper presents an Adaptive Quantum Circuit Architecture Search (AQ CAS) framework that dynamically generates and optimizes quantum circuit architectures using a hybrid search algorithm that integrates reinforcement learning, evolutionary operators, and evaluation without gradient. AQ CAS involves a task-specific feedback mechanism to eliminate those candidates that perform poorly and concentrate the search on those candidates with good performance. The framework is evaluated on benchmark data sets such as Iris, synthetic classical ML tasks, and hybrid quantum-classical tasks, and compared to fixed circuits, existing quantum NAS methods, and classical machine learning models. Experimental results indicate that AQ CAS can achieve higher accuracy for the task, using fewer qubits, fewer layers, and less training time, which further shows the need for adaptivity and task specialization. These results inform us about efficient hybrid classical-quantum pipelines, and give a glimpse of the directions that adaptive architecture search might take in enabling scalable and practical QML deployment.
Designing quantum neural networks (QNNs) that are both accurate and deployable on NISQ hardware is challenging. Handcrafted ansatze must balance expressivity, trainability, and resource use, while limited qubits often necessitate circuit cutting. Existing quantum architecture search methods primarily optimize accuracy while only heuristically controlling quantum and mostly ignore the exponential overhead of circuit cutting. We introduce QNAS, a neural architecture search framework that unifies hardware aware evaluation, multi objective optimization, and cutting overhead awareness for hybrid quantum classical neural networks (HQNNs). QNAS trains a shared parameter SuperCircuit and uses NSGA-II to optimize three objectives jointly: (i) validation error, (ii) a runtime cost proxy measuring wall clock evaluation time, and (iii) the estimated number of subcircuits under a target qubit budget. QNAS evaluates candidate HQNNs under a few epochs of training and discovers clear Pareto fronts that reveal tradeoffs between accuracy, efficiency, and cutting overhead. Across MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and Iris benchmarks, we observe that embedding type and CNOT mode selection significantly impact both accuracy and efficiency, with angle-y embedding and sparse entangling patterns outperforming other configurations on image datasets, and amplitude embedding excelling on tabular data (Iris). On MNIST, the best architecture achieves 97.16% test accuracy with a compact 8 qubit, 2 layer circuit; on the more challenging Fashion-MNIST, 87.38% with a 5 qubit, 2 layer circuit; and on Iris, 100% validation accuracy with a 4 qubit, 2 layer circuit. QNAS surfaces these design insights automatically during search, guiding practitioners toward architectures that balance accuracy, resource efficiency, and practical deployability on current hardware.
Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have been successfully applied to quantum approximate optimization algorithms, variational quantum compiling, and quantum machine learning models. The performance of VQAs is significantly influenced by the architecture of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). Quantum architecture search aims to automatically discover high-performance quantum circuits for specific VQA tasks. Quantum architecture search algorithms that utilize both SuperCircuit training and a parameter-sharing approach can save computational resources. If we directly follow the parameter-sharing approach, the SuperCircuit has to be trained to compensate for the worse search space. To address the challenges posed by the worse search space, we introduce an optimization strategy known as the efficient continuous evolutionary approach using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II). Then, we leverage prior information (symmetric property) designing Structure Symmetric Pruning for removing redundant gates of the searched ansatz. Experiments show that the efficient continuous evolutionary approach can search for more quantum architectures with better performance; the number of high-performance ansatzes obtained by our method is 10% higher than that in the literature (Du et al. in npj Quantum Inf. 8:62, 2022 ). The application of Structure Symmetric Pruning effectively reduces the number of parameters in quantum circuits without compromising their performance significantly. In binary classification tasks, the pruned quantum circuits exhibit an average accuracy reduction of 0.044 compared to their unpruned counterparts.
Photonic quantum computing is a promising platform for scalable quantum machine learning, but designing effective hybrid architectures remains challenging under hardware and optimization constraints. Existing approaches rely on manually tuned architectures that fail to account for the collaboration between classical preprocessing, phase encoding, and photonic circuit structure, limiting both accuracy and hardware compatibility. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture search framework for hybrid photonic quantum-classical models that combines genetic algorithm-based search with learnable quantum phase encoding to systematically explore the joint design space of classical and quantum components. Our framework encodes 19 hyperparameters across six gene groups and evolves a population of hybrid architectures using group-based crossover, per-gene mutation, and elitism, evaluating each candidate on a short training budget before full retraining of the best found design. We evaluate our framework on two image classification benchmarks, Digits and MNIST, achieving final validation accuracies of 99.44% and 98.78%, respectively, with first-principles execution time estimates on the Quandela Ascella photonic QPU projecting single-image inference at ~67 ms (Digits) and ~149 ms (MNIST). Our quantum contribution analysis further shows that the photonic layer extracts non-redundant features orthogonal to the classical pathway, providing a measurable accuracy advantage over classical-only baselines. Our results demonstrate that automated architecture search is both practical and impactful for hybrid photonic systems, opening the way for systematic design space exploration of quantum AI on photonic devices.
Recent advancements in quantum computing have shown promising computational advantages in many problem areas. As one of those areas with increasing attention, hybrid quantum-classical machine learning systems have demonstrated the capability to solve various data-driven learning tasks. Recent works show that parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) can be used to solve challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with provable learning advantages. While existing works yield potentials of PQC-based methods, the design choices of PQC architectures and their influences on the learning tasks are generally underexplored. In this work, we introduce EQAS-PQC, an evolutionary quantum architecture search framework for PQC-based models, which uses a population-based genetic algorithm to evolve PQC architectures by exploring the search space of quantum operations. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the performance of hybrid quantum-classical models in solving benchmark reinforcement problems. We also model the probability distributions of quantum operations in top-performing architectures to identify essential design choices that are critical to the performance.